The one in Barbados
by lyner
Summary: An alternate ending to season 9


Friends: a fan fiction episode! I wrote this in response to a board competition long ago, it was to write an alternative ending to season 9. Recovered it among some old files and thought i'd give it a publish. it's just this one piece, not too long, hope you enjoy it.

**The one in Barbados**

"You're… you're what?"

"I'm breaking up with you Phoebe."

"But David… Why?" The look on Phoebe's face was one of complete anguish. She couldn't figure why David, supposedly the love of her life, she supposedly being the love of _his_ life, could be saying this to her. She could already feel a fountain of tears rising up her throat.

"I went looking for you earlier, but as I was going in I heard Mon form her room. She was calling Mike and telling him that I was going to propose to you, but that he couldn't let that happen because she knew that he still loved you, and you still loved him, and that you were with me only because you couldn't be with him. Phoebe I don't want to be loving you like this, and you and Mike seem like you're meant for each other. I can't live with being your withdrawal symptom, even if you said yes. I'm sorry Phoebe. Goodbye."

David left the table quickly, without leaving time for Phoebe to say anything. She didn't even know how she herself felt anymore. But now she turned her hurt and sorrow into vengeance. She let the tears be fuel to the fire that was burning bright vermillion inside her, and turned to face Monica and Chandler, who had been at the next table.

"I can't believe you would do this to me."

"Phoebe -- I'm so sorry, I had no idea things would turn out this way."

"Oh, so, that means I'm supposed to forgive you now? You think it's just so easy, Monica? And so what with Mike, then?"

Monica looked down, bowing her head in guilt, but more so in readiness for the executioner's blow.

"I… When I told him that David was going to propose and that you were planning on saying yes… even though I told him he was who you really wanted to be with, he said it didn't matter because you had already moved on without him. So he didn't want to be part of your life anymore."

There, the guillotine had fallen. She looked up to see Phoebe looking at her with nothing but saturated hate, but that she could accept, she knew she deserved it. What cut her deep was the disappointment she saw in every tear that now streamed down Phoebe's face, the shaking of her head, the biting of her lip, and her back as she ran out of the restaurant, all saying "I will hate you forever."

She couldn't believe herself. What made her think she could just take peoples' lives and toy with them and place peoples' hearts where she liked? Chandler was right. He was always right. And she was the stupid, childish one even though she always made him believe the opposite. How could she have been so dumb!

"Ha. Looks like you should have listened to me," said Chandler with an uncomfortably smug smirk.

"Not right now."

"Wow. And your hair sure helps in liking you less."

She leered to the side.

"I thought our love meant something more than outside appearances."

"Hey, honey, it was just a joke, don't take it so serious- 

"If you didn't mean it, why did you say it."

_She_ didn't mean it. Why was she doing this? She knew she herself was to blame for Phoebe hating her, and Chandler had been right all along, and yet she was choosing to fight with him over the most insubstantial thing when she knew in the first place he didn't mean what he was saying.

"Mon!"

"You know, sometimes even when you're joking I know you mean it. I thought for four years that we had such a deep caring relationship and you throw all that back in my face and show me nothing that I loved about you was true."

"Hey!" said Chandler, visibly having moved from surprise to anger, and now he began to take the offensive.

"You know what, I thought so too. But if you would even think that I, who hasn't stopped loving you every day since I first kissed you, would even think that way, then maybe nothing I loved about _you_ was true."

"Don't turn this back at me!"

"Hey, I didn't start this in the first place. You know how I am, you i_know/i_ it was a joke. I would never do anything to hurt you, and all I've ever done in my life is to love you unconditionally. And if you can't see that, then I'm sorry."

He pulled his napkin off his lap, got up, and threw it down into the seat of his chair.

"I'm going back to the room. And quite honestly, I hope _you_ don't. And in case you had to guess, that was not a joke."

She wasn't going back to the room. She left her chair, and walked out of the hotel.

- - - - - -

Joey and Rachel had flung their lip-locked selves onto the bed, oblivious of everything else and only intent on the heat that was irrefutably there and building up ever constantly, as they both knew perfectly well.

Wow, thought Rachel. In her mind she wished that this could have happened earlier, that she wouldn't have been so blind a year ago and just said Yes I love you back to his face. But never mind the past, here, she finally had it. Passion rushed through her body and her adrenal glands dumped truckloads of adrenaline into her endocrine system. Her heart raced, sweat glistened all over her and her face was pale. Wow, thought Rachel.

Then her mind opened up and decided to face reason with clarity. What was she doing? This was not love! This was infatuation! And what was she doing, toying with the heart of another man who truly was in love with her? What, would she just tell him tomorrow that she was sorry, she never meant anything, it was only a whim? How could she be so selfish, when she knew that for once among all women he wasn't playing, and that he truly, sincerely, loved her? Hers was only a heart throb, a passing hormone that decided to drop by in her emotions and urge her and her stupidity to say "Kiss me" out loud. This wasn't real, and she had to end it.

How could she be so irresponsible anyway? She had a child! What, did she think this was going to work – Emma, Daddy, and Mommy's lover? And through all these years, heck-care whether they had been on a break or not, she knew, and had always known at the back of her head that Ross was still the only man she had ever loved, and the only man she would ever keep loving. In the first place he was Emma's father! She couldn't do this to him just so she could satisfy some inane impulse.

It hurt, more him than her most likely, as she pulled away from him.

"I'm so sorry Joey. I can't do this."

He looked away. He had known all along that this was coming, and just when he thought, Finally, this is for sure, Reality's lack of timeliness came and struck him in the face.

"I'm so sorry, Joey… I have a child.. My child has a father…"

There, the inevitable. He sighed. He knew he couldn't tell her to deny what had obviously always been the only route to take; not this back-alley passion.

"It's alright I understand."

He got up and off the bed, smoothed out his shirt and turned the door handle.

"Goodbye."

"Sorry…"

But the door was already closed and he was already on the other side while she was still here, separated by an irrevocable decision.

- - - - - -

Phoebe sat at the bar in the lounge at the other side of the hotel, waiting for her Scotch on the rocks with a twist. Ha, Monica's favourite drink. She had ordered it solely out of spite very unfamiliar to her, but who knew what love could drag up out of her as part of its messy trail.

"Here Ma'am, your drink."

And she spit in it.

"Give me a martini please."

Wow. Who knew what this seemingly perfect holiday could turn into. She felt it came along with the dreary weather, when Zeus decided to get back on the job and litter the sky with incessant lightning bolts and thunder. Joey had broken up with Charlie who had taken the first bus home, David had come and gone, and now Mike would never come again. She sat there, and drank down her martini gulp by gulp, heartbroken, as her tears trickled saltiness into her drink.

But these were just trivial, insignificant feelings. She raged instead with disbelief and disappointment at Monica. She knew soon she would come to immense regret and sadness that she had lost one of her very best friends, but as far as she was concerned that loss was none of her doing. Why did Monica always think she had to be in charge of everything? Why did she think she could just intervene in her own life? What gave her the right to take away forever the two and only men she had loved in her whole life? Well now she would never forgive her, and that would be too little to serve as her just desserts.

Phoebe herself began to be surprised at the breadths of her own anger, but she did not care, she would let it all flow out, and let her come back to normality through expending all these feelings of resentment, while she did her part to try and drown them as well.

"Another martini please."

- - - - - - -

At his end, Chandler was pretty much up to his eyebrows in alcohol himself. He was strewn on the bed, half naked with his trousers and socks still on, flushed crimson red and sweaty. He held in his right hand, that hung over the side of the bed, a bottle of whisky that was almost empty. From this bottle led a trail of empty bottles of the like, some broken some whole, to the open door of the now empty mini fridge. He hadn't drunk quite so much in his life before, but he had never felt so depressed before. Now his mind was becoming buoyant as he meandered between dreams and reality. Finally a hint of a smile came to his woozy forlorn face with its bloodshot eyes, and he decided to make this a habit.

How could he have been so heartless? He knew what Monica was feeling, and yet he went and said something so stupid. He knew that what she had said was only a retaliation of the guilt she felt about what she had done to Phoebe, and yet he had to argue with her. He knew better, so why couldn't he have just done the right thing and shut up? Why did he have to keep accusing her, when he knew clear well that she herself didn't mean anything she was saying? This was the world's dumbest, most insubstantial argument, so why did its aftermath have to be so real? And here he was, drunk silly and not out looking for her. But the thought was displaced by his last gulp of whisky, and couldn't be reclaimed as he slipped into unconsciousness.

- - - - - -

Rachel sat in her bed, now alone, now passionless. But she knew what she had done was the right thing, although there were surely many uncomfortable moments with Joey that were to follow, guilt every time he looked into her eyes with eyes that couldn't help but shout out I still love you, and the shame of having let something like that even happen. At least she had made the right decision, and she was determined to follow it through. There was no use refuting that there had always been something between her and Ross, that try as she might to snuff it out, it refused to be extinguished. He was after all the father of her child, and how could two people and the child they had together live like this forever?

But she wondered if he would even take her back. With all that hullabaloo she had made when they broke up six years ago, about them together never being a possibility again, all the confusing mess after that, now having culminated in this mess with Joey, what even made her so arrogant to think that _he_ would want to have _her _back? She herself had made it quite clear already that she thought it was time to move on, having dated and flirted with men even from when she was pregnant, while Ross had remained the father of their family, never leaving, always faithful. So what, she would just go to his room now and tell him I'm sorry Ross, love me again, and he would? What made her think she could be deemed worthy of him to love her again?

- - - - - -

Phoebe was positively wasted. She had drunk her entire life's savings away, but who cares, her whole life was gone anyway now that Mike and David were taken from her just like that. And she still wasn't anywhere near to forgiving the person who had so cruelly and heartlessly taken them away. She staggered in zigzags back to her room, fumbling through her purse to try and find her key, but somehow found herself knocking on the room door opposite her own. Funny, it was open, and the door swung wide to reveal Chandler sprawled on the bed and surrounded by some sort of ceremonious circle of bottles. There. The perfect thing to spite Monica with.

She closed the door, and threw her purse onto the couch and unhooked her top. She headed, unstably, toward the bed, and climbed onto it.

"Come here, Chandler."

"Unh-- What?"

"Come close, kiss me."

Chandler didn't have much of a choice. Every bottle of vodka and whisky and just about every other kind of alcohol on earth had entirely missed his liver and gone straight to his head, completely blinding him from the truth of the situation. He let Phoebe climb on top of him, and let himself lie absolutely motionless as Phoebe moved in towards his lips, while Phoebe herself couldn't quite believe what she was doing. The two of them were utterly doused in alcohol, too oblivious to hear the wind weaving among the gaps in the window as it hissed _adultery_.

- - - - - -

Monica sat outside in the rain, on a curb in the parking lot. The rain poured torturously, unleashing its torrential punishment, every drop hammering endless guilt further into her. How could she let this happen? How could she have been so negligent of his feelings? How could she let all this love between them that had never stopped growing, suddenly wither, rot and die with one careless fling of emotion? How could she be so stupid?

She let her tears flow mellifluously with the rain that was drenching her. Her hair was matted and tangled, like vines with thorns that she wished would please give her the retribution she deserved. Chandler was the most perfect man in the whole world; the kindest, most caring, most loving gentleman, and yet she could even find it in her to do this to him. He hardly deserved this, and that was so much of an understatement. How could she just take their love for granted and accuse him of never loving her, when she knew none of it was the truth?

Just like that, in a moment of selfish anger she had lost the one thing that meant the most to her in her life, and with one another moment of pride had lost one of her best friends, and she could only pray that both were not gone forever, when she knew that that held so little possibility. Everything was all her fault. If only she could have just stopped herself, if only she had smiled at Chandler's joke instead of rebuking, if only she had told herself that she had no place in handling the lives of others. If only time could be reversed, and everything could be set right once more.

She had to do something. She couldn't sit there in the rain, blaming herself, hating herself, no matter how much she desperately wanted to. She had to find Chandler, because she could not bear the thought of losing him forever even though it was already so much of a reality. She didn't want to be without him, ever.

She ran back to the hotel, took the lift, and ran down the corridors desperately counting the numbers down to her room.

Please, Chandler. Forgive me.

- - - - - -

Fate and its uncanny twisted sense of humour.

Phoebe and Chandler were locked in an inseparable embrace, kissing passionately and holding each other. But neither was enjoying herself or himself, caught up in a net of guilt, and neither of them really wanted to be where they were. But sinful drunkenness had completely obliterated free will, and the two gushed out their sorrows in each kiss that did not make love, and far from seeked reason.

Suddenly the door gently opened, and the two heard it. They sat up, and saw Monica, wet through and through, but now seeming more so because of her endless tears than the rain. She swallowed hard, closed her eyes, and tried not to see what was too late to dismiss, and ran out of the room.

- - - - - -

"I saw her go down to the bar."

All he could think of was, What have I done? Here she had come to make up with him, set things right with him again, and while their relationship had until present been teetering on the edge of a pit of fire, he had gone and pushed it in full force. It was now his turn to try and set this right, and he had to.

He went down to the bar, where he saw Monica, still drenched and bleary eyed, sitting at the bar with a drink in her hand. Scotch on the rocks with a twist. He knew there wasn't a chance in the world she would even want to look at him, let alone speak to him, so he rushed to the band and asked if he could take the microphone.

_Never knew I could feel like this  
Like I've never seen the sky before  
Want to vanish inside your kiss  
Everyday I love you more and more_

She looked up to see him up on the stage, singing his heart out into the microphone.

_Listen to my heart can you hear it sing  
Telling me to give you everything  
Seasons may change Winter to Spring  
But I love you until the end of time_

She stood up, and began to walk away.

_Come what may  
Come what may_

_  
I will love you until my dying day_

Chandler, looks like we've both won ourselves the end of this journey.

Goodbye.


End file.
